Doctor Dead for 3 Years Tweets on Twitter “And NONE of it is RUSSIAN COLLUSION” — Russian Bots Anyone?

Twitter has a huge problem with Russian bots.

It was obvious during the 2016 U.S. election, when Twitter accounts popped up all over the place spreading lies about Hillary Clinton and praising Donald Trump.

It has been obvious since, as Russian bots on Twitter are all over the social media platform tweeting misinformation about gun control, employment figures, Muslims, immigrants, Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia and, yep, Hillary Clinton. Still.

Today, however, one tweet that was obviously from a Russian bot appeared in my Twitter feed that had been retweeted by NBC News reporter Ben Collins.

Twitter also recently admitted more than 50,000 Russian bots were on their platform tweeting about the 2016 election with either misleading information or downright lies. These bots had apparently reached more than 677,000 Americans with their tweets before they were shut down.

Recently, Twitter was also forced to contact more than 1.4 million people using the social media platform, and tell them they had interacted with Twitter bots that were being run by the Russian-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA).

In other words, as Russian bots on Twitter continue to spread their misinformation and lies, the rest of us can do nothing much but either keep a vigilant eye and report obvious bots to Twitter Support, or simply move away from the platform and spend our time doing something more constructive instead.

I chose to do the latter. Especially as Twitter has not been taking the problem of Russian bots as seriously as they should be.

In fact, if anything, they seem to be encouraging them simply by refusing to be aggressive with their methods of finding them and stopping them.

Then again, more Twitter accounts means more money for Twitter and founder Jack Dorsey, right?